


the hollow

by SloopOfWar



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Angst, Character Study, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Rough Sex, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:00:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24377629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SloopOfWar/pseuds/SloopOfWar
Summary: He can't bring himself to care for something that was never his in the first place.
Relationships: Ansem Seeker of Darkness | Xehanort's Heartless/Xemnas
Kudos: 25





	the hollow

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Please consult tags.  
> This started out as a bit of smut practice and then turned into something in its own right. Kudos/comments always appreciated!

In the early days of the Real Organisation, he and Ansem don't speak much. There's something a little too surreal about him, too existential; like Xemnas has just watched his reflection step out of a slanted mirror and act as if it had always belonged in the land of the living. Xemnas keeps his distance, only addressing him when Xehanort bids they work together. Any attempt at small talk on Ansem's part and Xemnas has an excuse on hand to bail. By his narrowed eyes and pinched mouth, Xemnas suspects Ansem isn't the type who lets people turn their backs to him without retribution. Sometimes, he can sense he's being watched from afar, but Xemnas doesn't dignify the discourtesy of his stare with a response. Rather, he dives headlong into his work like he always does, rifling through piles of reports, planning group lectures, pouring over maps, percentages, profiles, logistics… 

He’s been able to ignore that nagging little feeling in the pit of his stomach for some time now, the inkling that he isn’t quite on the path he wants to be. A colleague who toes his boundaries shouldn’t be anything compared to that, especially with his experience in the field. If he was able to deal with pond life like Number VIII, then he can deal with Ansem.

But Ansem is for all intents and purposes his equal, and he isn't able to reprimand the man in the same way he could with his subordinates in his old order. It becomes clear that he's punishing Xemnas for his lack of attention when he starts showing up halfway through meetings that don't concern him, loitering around in the shadows and distracting everyone. Sometimes he even finishes Xemnas's sentences for him, like the two of them were a pair of grotesque performing wind-up dolls. With sweat prickling on the back of his neck, Xemnas smiles coldly, thanks him for his contribution, and then does his very best to re-assume autocracy over the group while he pictures himself gutting Ansem and splattering his insides all over the floor.

It's difficult enough without his interference. Xigbar's familiar smirk has a particularly cruel edge to it these days that pierces like a knife, and he's never known Saïx to be so closed off to conversation before. He finds himself thinking about it late at night, tangled in his sheets, tossing and turning for hours until he's numb, barely responding to the cold light of dawn breaking through the curtains. Ansem comes to him as a lover for the first time one of these nights; sliding between his sheets like a viper. In his moment of weakness, Xemnas wasn't in any fit state of mind to turn away the company.

He holds three fingers hard to the hollow of Ansem’s throat. The skin strains pale under the pressure; Ansem’s eyes lid slightly, his breathing hitches. The thud of his heartbeat around his fingertips is exhilarating. When Xemnas relieves the compression, he leaves his hand where it is. The threat is implicit, but they can’t proceed without it. Not when Ansem’s rather underhand and encroaching style of combat translates almost like for like into the bedroom.

Between the two of them, there’s no question as to who would best who in a physical scuffle. Anything particularly egregious from Ansem and Xemnas wouldn’t even have to summon an ethereal blade to seriously incapacitate him. All he’d have to do is press down hard enough and the larynx would puncture under the force of his fingers. It’s just a question of design. Ansem’s body is built to fight from afar; long-range attacks before swooping in to make the final kill like some bird of prey, all sleek and slight and sharp at his edges.

Xemnas is the opposite. He surges forward and blasts his opponent apart in a ferocious dance of brute strength and speed, thus the lines of his body are cut broad and imposing. In an enclosed space like the small, low-ceilinged bedrooms of their castle, Ansem has no chance of gaining the upper hand. That’s the only reason Xemnas allows Ansem to take liberties where he does; he _allows_ a flimsy illusion of control on Ansem’s part, but really, he can stop anything and everything the second he chooses to. If he chooses to.

In practice, most of the time… he just doesn’t.

Truth is, he can’t really bring himself to care for something that was never really his in the first place. His body is only ever a means to Xehanort’s ends, and he’ll be losing it in this war one way or another. With the finality of it all staring him in the face, at least this way he’s wringing some gratification out of it before it’s taken from him, even if his pleasure has to be fought for and won on the back of pain.

Beggars can’t be choosers, after all. With the cost of his deceit cutting far deeper than he anticipated, Ansem is the only man in the castle who doesn’t look at Xemnas like Xemnas has wounded him.

He looks at Xemnas like he’s a piece of meat, but Xemnas rationalises it's better than nothing.

Sometimes, he finds his attention wandering away from Ansem's hands or his mouth and focusing instead on his hair. The way it slithers over his shoulders. The silky feel of it against Xemnas's calloused palms. How it fans out over the sheets like a moonbeam, until there are strands of it everywhere.

He clearly takes good care of it. Far more than Xemnas takes care of his own shaggy mane. He just about remembers to run a brush through it before he embarks on another gruelling day. Ansem points out his split ends and tuts.

“Think of how exquisite you would look if you put a little more effort into making yourself presentable,” he says. He sounds like he’s only half joking. “You should use conditioner.”

There was a point in his life where he would have agreed. As Superior of the first Organisation, a largely magisterial role, he set ironclad standards on the importance of good appearances. Since their relocation, since he came into his new replica body and was summarily knocked several rungs down the ladder and off the seat of his own pride both, Xemnas's role is that of a military commander. If anything else, he's just the sum of his own usable parts. He catagorises his relationship with Ansem somewhere around the realm of the latter, and nowhere in between does he have room to fawn over himself any more like he's some object to be admired.

Scarce few admire him now anyway, and that wouldn't change if he decked himself in finery, spritzed himself in cologne and paraded himself around like a king.

“If you have time to endlessly preen yourself, then perhaps you haven’t taken on your fair share of the workload.” He pushes Ansem's hand away.

Later that evening, he’s forced to summon Luxord to his quarters.

The Gambler hums as he inspects the damage. “I can’t work a miracle, but I believe we can disguise the worst of it. Heartless, was it?”

Very astute. “How could you tell?”

“Anytime I come across the little buggers, they insist on robbing me of half my clothing,” says Luxord. “Hence I have always argued the innumerable benefits to cropping the hair short in our line of work. Of course, no one listened. Why, I even think some of the others were competing for the honour of the most cumbersome barnet."

Xemnas imagines himself with a shaved head. He'd look less like Ansem, sure, but then he might just end up looking like Xehanort.

"Noted," he says. "The next time I encounter a swarm, I shall tie it back. For now, if we could just alleviate the look of it."

Luxord gets to work. They sit in relative silence, disturbed only by the scissors snipping and Luxord's occasional pensive sound. If he were Luxord, being asked to mitigate a hair disaster for the man who manipulated and lied to him for a decade, he'd probably do his best to make him look as foolish as possible. Luxord certainly has the charm to pull off such a plot and feign innocence. However, when Luxord brushes the trimmings off his shoulders and hands him a mirror, it looks... surprisingly well. A little shorter, inevitably, but the casual eye wouldn't suspect there was a massive bald spot hiding away beneath the spiky strands.

"Elegant work, though I expected nothing less from a man of your panache." He makes a mental note to assign Luxord a few extra days leave in thanks.

Luxord accepts the compliment with a thin smile. "Mind you take care of yourself, Xemnas."

Xemnas looks up, but the back of Luxord's platinum head vanishes down a dark corridor before he can say another word. He glances over at his bed; impeccably made, fresh sheets. There's no indication there that he was just fucked so hard he hit his head on the wall and momentarily lost consciousness. When he came to, Ansem was crawling off him with his hands full of thick silver hair, torn out at the root. Xemnas remembers watching him brush it off to fall to the floor like shimmering silver confetti.

He sets down the mirror so carefully you'd think it might explode. Then he gets to his feet and goes about his day.

Now that he's living in the same castle as Xehanort and Terra, and has to look at them both on a regular basis, he finds himself wondering how much of his physical appearance is attributed to each of them. Is it an even split down the middle? Is the proportion calculable by percentage? Is he more of one than the other?

He knows he has the boy's features – his sharp cheekbones, his upturned eyes, the same angular profile and the strong lines of his chest. And yet all his colouring comes from the old man. Dark skin in place of pale, silver hair over brown, and that soft, innocent blue in his eyes yielding entirely to unnatural, alien gold.

But there are some other smaller, inconsequential things he finds himself thinking about. For instance, he has a mole on the crook of his neck, hidden just beneath his coat collar. He looks at his reflection sometimes while he dresses and wonders which of the two carries the same mark. It's not like he'll ever ask Xehanort or that haunted creature that was once the boy. Sometimes he likes to think it's entirely his, that by some inexplicable phenomenon he has one little part of his natural body that he doesn't share with anyone else. Something that belongs entirely to _Xemnas_.

Then he discovers Ansem has one in the exact same place. With some resignation on his part, a treasure hunt begins to find out which birthmarks on their bodies match. As it turns out, it’s all of them. Down to the very last freckle.

While Xemnas can concede it's interesting, Ansem finds it endlessly fascinating. Once their clothes come off, he goes right to the burgundy fingerprint on the inside of Xemnas's left thigh, the scatter of dark freckles on his forearms. The little raised patch at his crown which they suspect is another mole. Xemnas savours the gentle touch while it lasts. Odds are, it won't.

“Oh?" Ansem's fingers halt at a slim pale scar just above the mole on his neck. "What's this?"

Xemnas budges his hand out of the way to give it a feel. “Xaldin,” he remembers. “He nicked me with his lance during training. About seven or eight years ago.”

Ansem hums. “And this?”

Xemnas looks down at the dark bolt of lightning bisecting his ribs. “Sora. When the first Organisation fell.”

“And these?” He smooths a thumb over three jagged scratches on Xemnas’s hip. They’re pink and swollen, no more than a day old, gouged against the bone by fingernails. "Who gave you these?"

Unwilling to humour him, Xemnas doesn't respond. Ansem’s smirk is so aggravating he thinks of getting up and walking out. He rests his hand against Ansem's throat before sliding it down to brace his weight against his chest. Thankfully, the hint is taken to just skip the nonsense and get to it; Ansem loses that expression on his face as he retrieves the vial of lube and prepares them both until they're slick and, in Xemnas's case, stretched.

They shuffle about until the angle is right, and then they’re left gasping in each other’s faces as the breach comes and Xemnas takes him right up to the hilt. It always hurts at first. Xemnas was never on the receiving end of this specific act before Ansem, not even when he took lovers in the first Organisation. Xaldin was a mutual blowjobs type of man and Saïx would have spread his legs for anyone and anything if it meant furthering his position. Xemnas was far more like himself when he was with either them, pontificating away to his heart’s content. Right now, however, when he feels so full and everything stings and his eyes are squeezed shut against the pressure, he has no words.

Carelessly, Ansem starts to move right away, and it’s like having a knife jammed in his pelvis. He slides his fingers back up to dig into Ansem's throat in warning, bowing over him until his height and breadth eclipses the other man’s body on the bed. Ansem blinks up at him, his eyes an eerie duality of bright and dark. They stare at each other for a few long pulsating minutes before Ansem tsks and backs up; flipping them both around, so Ansem is on top and Xemnas lying back against the pillows.

Inevitably, it comes down to this - Ansem having to mete out a considerable amount of foreplay before Xemnas relaxes enough to be fucked at his harsh pace, but he doesn’t seem to mind it too much. In fact, Xemnas suspects part of the thrill for Ansem is working Xemnas down to the point he longer cares to stick up for his dignity once Ansem sees fit to leave his mark; that kairotic moment Xemnas gives himself over to the chaos. It must be similar to how he felt when he finally ensnared Riku’s body for himself. The boy’s resistance was all part of the pleasure and the fruits of Ansem’s plunder would have tasted all the sweeter for it.

And Ansem is certainly experienced. He flicks his tongue against the scar on Xemnas’s neck and then slithers down his body to swallow him expertly. Xemnas’s eyes slip halfway shut; his blood crests under his skin. His fingers find their way back into Ansem’s hair, tugging insistently, watching under heavy eyelids as saliva drips down Ansem’s chin and neck. Arching up his hips under those long licks, the smooth slide of lips, his head presses back into the pillows and he sighs.

By the time Ansem pulls away, he’s fast sliding down the slippery slope of no return. Memories of Round Room meetings come at him as he rolls over onto his front, how he once sat on high and made the others grovel beneath his feet. He’d barely be able to look down his nose at a flea right now, what with him bearing his ass and spreading his legs and throwing aside all decorum for the thrill of an orgasm. Reduced to these base responses to sexual stimuli; a body succumbing to the delirious rush of blood through his veins. It's relieving, to let go of that obligation to honour some idea of himself as if he wasn't trundling ever closer to the abyss.

Does Ansem ever contemplate their inevitable fate? Or has he, like Xemnas, long since reconciled his body as a smaller extension of a larger organism; something with a prearranged life, the expiry date set long before it would ever grow old?

The questions will have to wait. Ansem clamps teeth on his neck and mounts him like a feral cat, snaking a hand around to tightly grasp Xemnas at the base of his cock. When he starts to thrust, thick and shallow, Xemnas can’t help but moan. He’s close. He’ll come in no time like this, no matter what Ansem thinks that grip will accomplish.

“Fuck, you’re so hard up for it,” he breathes in Xemnas’s ear, as if he isn’t in a similar state himself. His pace drags, his stomach muscles quivering along the low of Xemnas's back. “Were you ever this eager for anyone else? Or do you think your body innately knows this is something only _I_ can give it?"

Obscene.

“Ansem, I know you love the sound of your own voice, but half the time you come across positively ghoulish.” It's incredible he can keep his voice even. He’s a little breathless, but at least he’s not whining. “Remember that silence is one of the great arts of conversation.”

A snicker. “That’s funny, coming from you.” Ansem's teeth fasten themselves on the crook of his neck once more, his spare hand fisting in Xemnas’s hair. Xemnas doesn’t even flinch when nails scrape along the hot, pulsing patches where the hair was torn right out of the scalp. All of his self preservation is gone; it’s leapt to its death right through the window.

His mouth falls open as the pace intensifies to something harsh and merciless, but his groans stick in his throat. Ansem makes more than enough noise for the two of them, grunting heavily around the point he’s latched on. It’s not loud enough to obscure the crude hollow slap of his cock or the obnoxious squeak of the bedsprings; and Xemnas almost _wants_ Xehanort to walk past their door and hear what they’re up to. Something he has no say in nor will he ever be a part of. Something they've made just for the two of them.

But he can only endure this for so long. Xemnas grits his teeth as the over stimulation becomes unbearable, and then it's just painful and he's had enough. He twists, trying to break free of Ansem's grip. All that accomplishes is Ansem grinding his teeth even harder to prevent his escape. He splits the skin - he must be trying to rip loose a chunk of flesh to chew up and swallow. Blood skitters out over the sheets and Ansem’s groan resonates through the bite. Xemnas feels it right in the hollow of his throat, hears his own voice rises up in answer, and the noise he makes sounds like crying. To reward him for his perseverance, or perhaps to discourage him from trying to pull free again, that hand finally releases its grip around the base of his cock and slides up his length in just three hard strokes before he’s shooting all he’s worth out onto the sheets.

The ecstasy takes him above and beyond himself; a momentary lapse of reality. Distantly, he hears himself saying Ansem's name and makes a note not to give him the satisfaction next time.

After, when he rises tiredly from the soiled sheets and tries to put all the pieces of himself back together, Ansem is smoothing his beautiful hair until it falls back into that unbroken sheet of silver. When he licks the red off his teeth and zips himself back up in black leather, he looks impeccable. Like he was never even there.

Xemnas is a mess, stained with sweat, cum, blood; the works. If he was a person, this is the point where the shame would obliterate him. His head spins, pain flares up his spine with every movement. He might even throw up, but at least he’s immune to the indignity. Behind closed doors at least.

He presses a hand to his neck and it comes away stark red and wet.

Fascinated by its vivid scarlet hue under the low lamplight, he stares. Watches it drip bleeding strings down the dark skin of his forearm. He thinks of smearing it all over Ansem's face, into his hair and leaving an imprint of his own for once. But Ansem presses a kiss to corner of his mouth and disappears down a dark corridor before he has a chance, leaving him on his own.

“Who gave you this?” Ansem asks, tracing his fingers over the scar just above the mole on his neck. 

“You did,” says Xemnas shortly. Much to his chagrin, a _Cura_ and a hefty dose of potion didn’t get rid of the bite entirely. The bruises faded but the teeth marks endured, a ring of faint purple semi-circles for everyone to see. Xehanort hadn’t looked one bit pleased, especially after Xemnas backhanded his younger self across the face for sneering and calling him trashy.

Xaldin’s scar has all but been buried beneath the new wound.

“And these?” His ribs are criss-crossed in fine red lines, scored by nails Ansem must have sharpened on butcher's steel before coming to him. Incidentally, the point where the keyblade split through him is still visible.

"You.”

“No,” Ansem corrects. He curls up against Xemnas's side and yawns. “Us. We did.”

And what was that _we_ referring to? Xemnas looks at him thoughtfully. Was it the collective Xehanort we? Was it we, as in him and Ansem? After all this time they've spent together, for being heart and body and all the rest, he still doesn't truly understand this man. For all he knows, Ansem could be using the royal we, in all his astounding arrogance.

His eyes slide over Ansem's shoulder to the clothes he's unearthed for the upcoming battle, lying over the back of a chair. A long black coat with heavy epaulettes, a belted white vest. Matching white gloves.

"Why do you have to wear that ridiculous outfit?" he asks.

Ansem shrugs. "I'm not interested in pretending to be something I'm not, certainly not this late in the game." Xemnas turns his face away as he leans in for a kiss. Ansem drops it instead against the corner of his mouth and tugs the covers up over the two of them. "You should get some sleep. We'll be summoned soon."

"Do you want me to stay?" They haven't done that before.

"Why not? If this was our last time, then I want to have you with me a little longer."

"You assume the feeling is mutual."

Ansem's lips curl, but he doesn't respond and Xemnas makes no move to rise. His fingers sneak across the sheets and press gently against the hollow of Ansem's throat, until he can feel the soft beat of his pulse. As the night hurtles toward the break of a new day, he keeps his fingers there, until he imagines he can feel Ansem's heartbeat throb down the very marrow of his bone.


End file.
